Research: Australian Aboriginals showed adaptability in last ice age

CAIRNS, Australia, Sept. 23 (UPI) -- The last ice age required Aboriginal Australians to concentrate in areas with good food and water supplies, abandoning most of the continent, researchers said.

Research recently published in the Journal of Archaeological Science offers new information on the ways Aboriginal Australians met the challenges of extreme climate change during the Last Glacial Maximum, which peaked 20,000 years ago, the James Cook University said Sunday in a release.

"We are trying to understand how people responded to these extreme conditions," Sean Ulm, an associate professor at James Cook University, said.

"The magnitude of change was phenomenal," Ulm, a lead researcher on the project and deputy director of university's Center for Tropical Environmental and Sustainability Science, said. "Lakes dried up, forests disappeared, deserts expanded, animals went extinct and vast swaths of the Australian land mass would have been simply uninhabitable."

Co-leader of the study, Alan Williams from the Fenner School of Environment and Society at The Australian National University, said surviving the last ice age required Aboriginal communities to adapt to massive change.

"As much as 80 percent of Australia was temporarily abandoned by Aboriginal people at the height of the [ice age], when conditions were at their worst," he said.

Williams said Aboriginals were forced to change their hunting practices, the types of food eaten and technologies they were using to deal with new circumstances.

"We expect there would have been huge impacts on social relationships and religious beliefs as well, but these types of changes are much harder to detect in the archaeological record," he said. "One thing we can say for sure is that extreme climate change results in the fundamental social and economic reorganization of society."

United Press International is a leading provider of news, photos and information to millions of readers around the globe via UPI.com and its licensing services.

With a history of reliable reporting dating back to 1907, today's UPI is a credible source for the most important stories of the day, continually updated - a one-stop site for U.S. and world news, as well as entertainment, trends, science, health and stunning photography. UPI also provides insightful reports on key topics of geopolitical importance, including energy and security.

A Spanish version of the site reaches millions of readers in Latin America and beyond.

UPI was founded in 1907 by E.W. Scripps as the United Press (UP). It became known as UPI after a merger with the International News Service in 1958, which was founded in 1909 by William Randolph Hearst. Today, UPI is owned by News World Communications.